Intel has launched a data-centre chip using low-power technology found in smartphones, stepping up competition in the nascent microserver market and winning a nod from Facebook.

The Atom chip rolled out on Tuesday uses much less electricity than Intel's previous processors for servers and comes as Intel's rivals also eye the low-power server niche.

Energy-sipping chips similar to those used in smartphones and tablets lack the horsepower of traditional server processors made by Intel.

But data centres that combine many low-power chips instead of just a few heavy-duty processors may provide more computing power for less money, and use less electricity.

Microservers have yet to gain serious traction with traditional corporate customers like banks and manufacturers, and the potential size of the market remains unclear.

But internet giants like Facebook, Amazon.Com and Google have been experimenting with ways to use low-power chips to make their data centres more efficient.

At an Intel event launching the Atom chips, a Facebook infrastructure executive said the social network has found that low-power chips excel at processing the 4.5 billion updates, likes, posts and comments its 1 billion active users add to the site every day.

"We do face unprecedented scale at Facebook, and that's one of the reasons we're so highly motivated to figure out the most efficient way to scale infrastructure efficiently and support all the people using Facebook," said Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's VP of hardware design and supply chain. He did not say whether Facebook expects to buy Intel's new chips.